biren34's comments

I say that the need to start your own thing is a bug not feature. It IS a hard life, with tons of risk, change, and uncertainty. My wife hates the instability of it all. I've missed or worked through many vacations, concerts, and other things over the years.

It's not even clear that it's a good deal, when you factor in opportunity costs, hours worked, and chances of success.

So, it if you don't have to do it, don't do it. You're not going to succeed unless you are just the kind of person who can't be happy going down another path.

It all sounds harsh, but it's actually a lot better than the risk/reward offered in many other fields: acting, writing, sports, etc.

This is just how professions with tournament-style payouts work, and you either buy in or you don't. Know thyself...it never pretended to be anything else.

Huh. Didn't realize I had those two words mixed up. Thanks!

If you haven't heard of it, you've just stated the weak anthropomorphic principle.

I don't understand why so many people who care about greenhouse gases (and so love renewable energy sources) refuse to acknowledge that producing the equipment that generates "renewable" energy required massive energy investment (that came from fossil fuels).

And so there are two payback periods: one financial and the other environmental. This person extended their environmental payback period to achieve "abundance".

I have no problem with that, but the fact that it's considered "free" on the very same dimension that they originally sought to optimize--when it's clearly not free--baffles me.

I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your comment.

I'd add, though, that the entire complex of metrics we use to define "productivity" were invented to quantify and guide the improvement of things that were a problem 100 years ago

Of course the second 50 years were worse than the first 50 years, because if the people working during the first 50 years accomplished anything, then all the easy wins were taken.

And the problems being solved changed. If your entire population has moved on from the problem of producing enough to meet material needs, then of course the work being done now will score poorly. You need to update your metrics as fast as your technology changes, and we just haven't done that.

Everything you've described above is a real added value, but it's not the kind of value that the old metrics were designed to measure.

Classic case of grading fish by their ability to climb trees.

This doesn't have to be true, though it is for many.

If you can find a version of your dreams that pays the rent and puts food on the table, you can still chase them.

Your financial metabolism does go up though, and the total universe of options shrinks. Ramen profitable doesn't mean actual ramen when you've got a spouse and kids.

I found that I've gotten much further in pursuing my dreams after having kids than before. Maybe it's just coincidence, but I feel a lot of the skills I had to learn to be the kind of parent I wanted to be translated almost 1 for 1 to improving my business outcomes.

Okay at the risk of being offensive, all the comments before mine are made by overly intellectual fools.

I'm not usually so insulting--but as a father of two, if my 3 year old and 1.5 year old could only read one book, it would have to be "Oh, the places you'll go" by Dr. Suess.

Sorry to stomp on Das Kapital and its ilk, but if you get only one book, I can't imagine a better first message to convey than the endless possibilities inherent in each of us.

The world is your oyster! Even if you're old and have wasted most of what you were given. Especially today, in some of the most amazing times that have ever existed (even if you didn't draw the long straw). Today is SO much better than most of history.

I see a lot of comments about firing and chaos, but the single most important point to me is "you manage processes and lead people".

So many managers get this wrong that just fixing this one thing probably gets most startups 60% of the way there.

So...this is the kind of spider that bit Peter Parker, right?

I have no idea of what's in this bill or not, but the very concept of "cost" in this case seems misleading.

What's the "cost" of not investing in our nation's infrastructure?

Back in high school (pre-internet), we'd sign up a particular friend every time we saw one of the information collection boxes for 24 hour fitness.

He could never figure out why they just wouldn't stop calling him

I have no idea what's allowed in HN recruiting terms, but I'm working at a company that is very much worried about making sure we deliver value, and we have several positions open.

I think one of the most profound intellectual insights I've had is that the myth of Prometheus was in a sense true, but described events so old--that we wouldn't event consider the "people" in the myth (the ones who received the gift of fire) as human.

It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.

I work with data a lot, and my main issue with hedonic adjustment is that anytime I've ever made any such adjustment to "improve" a metric that wasn't purely mechanical (like a moving average or a ratio to another number), it's just one step away from making the number say anything I want it to.

The entire concept of "fixing" a metric relies on an inhuman level of self-truthfulness to not just lead you down the path of hearing only what you want to hear.

The point of metrics is that they should slap you in the face with objective reality, and improvement is just too subjective a concept.

I think this is just an obvious example of a much larger phenomenon. The trend over the past 40 years has been to put efficiency above all--but that means there is no excess capacity left to ensure robustness. Even "normal" variation in patterns can cause outsized disruptions, especially of the extreme edge of the range only occurs on a timeframe much longer than the optimization cycles used to achieve efficiency.

Efficiency also tends favor exactly one configuration over all others, so any changes that impact the viability of that one path leave the system with few, if any, alternatives--and those tend to have been atrophied.

In each case, the specifics can be quite different, but the general principal is that, in order to avoid such periods of supply chaos and constraint, someone has to be willing to pay a higher price so that more than just the lowest-cost suppliers can survive for when they're needed.

In most situations, the periodic supply crunch may actually be preferable to the consequences of subsidizing the existence of less efficient players. But the costs of efficiency are just as real as the costs of robustness, they just tend to be paid out via a very short period of large excess of profits, as opposed to a long period of slightly better margins.

I'm not sure if the areas under the curve end up being equal, but "efficiency" can certainly be overdone to the point of being inefficient over the full cycle.

Fair enough.

So...you get to arbitrate my parents' experience of poverty?

I'll let my mom know that she wasn't poor when my parents spent an entire year eating nothing but cabbage, and they weren't poor when they had to leave me with my grandparent for 15 months (back when there were no video calls and long-distance was too expensive) because they couldn't support a child and build a new life. That they weren't too poor when my dad was working 2 jobs while studying for his license and had to live in a tiny apartment with roommates and borrow money to meet basic expenses.

I get it. There are people who have been and are currently worse-off. The idea that everything should always and everywhere be measured in relation to the extreme reach of the left-tail is batsh*t.

The whole point of the comment that I replied to was that the commentor felt that the article needed to be aware of and somehow speak to his experience--while he's a stranger on the internet who the original author could not possibly know anything about.

I have specifically detailed some of my mom's experience of poverty to you, and you claim the right to deny it--what, because they were not the worst-off people in recent human history? If I had said, "my parents were rich because we had X,Y,Z", would you have commented "No, your parents were not rich because they did not also possess a chateau and a private jet?"

Is this it? Any and every judgement of a comment and denial of experience can be "okay", as long as it's approached from the left-tail? Does this not strike you as mad?

The comment was that the points about money "are, frankly, insulting".

I'd call yours a radical interpretation of the text.

I have no particular beef with you, so please don't take it that way--but "the absolute reality that is the importance of money to survival" is a subjective assessment that does not have to be (and is not) shared by 100% of the population.

Again, in extremis: Buddhist monks. And if Buddhist monks exist (and don't care about money), then surely there can be a spectrum of what money means to different people?

Maybe there's even a more successful attitude for earning money than maintaining a singular focus on monotonically-increasing your inventory of it? Maybe past a certain point, the best thing to do with money is to risk it? (Which doesn't even imply forgetting or debating its importance?)

You would be fair to say "this advice doesn't apply to me" or "this advice only applies when conditions X, Y, and Z have been met" or even "this advice is wrong". However, the statement that this advice is "insulting" creates a toxic environment.

No one will ever be able to anticipate all the ways they might cross/deny/fail to recognize someone else's experience or what they "know to be true". Nor is that anyone's job. After all, we're all just stumbling through this thing-called-life trying to do our best. If people persist in taking offense to comments made by strangers on the internet who have never heard of them, the only logical outcome is to exclude those people from the discussion. Is this what you would choose for yourself?

At best, this makes it harder to for me to find like-minded people to have the discussions I want to have--and at worst, it deprives people from being exposed to things that they might find valuable in those discussions, because those discussions are no longer being had in the open where they could be stumbled upon.

Whatever you choose to do from this point forward is no skin off my back. My point is that, in the face of such reactions, my response is to take my very important (to me), real-world discussions about maximizing my life-given-my-circumstances away from the people who would comment in this way.

Anyway, this is not a debate I need to win. Maybe you want to hear this stuff, maybe you don't.

Many poor people have totally different experiences. My mother, for example, was only able to continue past 4th grade in India because one of her uncles supported her while making her create a budget for the entire school year down to the last pencil. This was while she helped her mom care for her 6 brothers and sisters in a house that didn't have running water or paved streets. She and my dad (who grew up not-quite-so-poor-but-still-pretty-poor) moved to the US and built up a very nice life for me and my sister.

Not that their experiences are any more representative of "poor" than what people here write about, but there are clearly different experiences and different outcomes. Again, this is not to shame anyone--but the fact that I have to caveat an accurate description of my parents' life to assuage some unknown reader's sensibility is just crazy to me.

But for the sake of argument, I'll concede everything you've described about the "poor experience" and the emotional consequences faced by this group.

Given that, does that mean that any and every discussion among the people not in that group must be couched in ways in order to not offend the sensitive group? How / where should non-deprived people discuss the best way to play the cards they were lucky enough to be dealt?

In extremis, do we need to segregate ourselves away from the sensitive group in order to protect their delicate constitutions?

Complaining about the the "privilege" that the median HN reader/commenter is born with is like if I stumbled on to a message board for 6'8" super-athletic 18-year olds and spent all my time lecturing them about how they need to consider 5'8" kinda-athletic-once-but-now-middle-aged-me in all their discussions. Of course a programmer-centric newsboard is going to have a bunch of well-off people in it.

Now, people shouldn't be jerks--but nothing in the posted article can be construed in the least-bit mean-spirited. The goal posts seemed to have moved from "don't be a dick" to "pretend you're in a support group for X all the time". Is this where we're going?